RSL not only dominates the landscape, but it also culturally shapes those thousands who left their homes to work there. In examining these views, Gewertz and Errington also consider those of Yali, a PNG political leader. Significantly, Yali figures not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel-a history the authors probe through its contrast with RSL's. Gewertz and Errington disagree with Diamond not because of the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made - and from an insistence that those with power must be held accountable for affecting history.

Gewertz has taught at Amherst since 1977. She and Errington have co-authored several books, including Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge, 1987), Articulating Change in the "Last Unknown" (Westview, 1995), Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (Cambridge, 1991) and Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference (Cambridge, 1999). Gewertz is also the author of numerous articles in books and journals, including American Ethnologist and American Anthropologist.